Workshops By The Numbers

As we count down the days before the National Broadband Plan is due, it's worth taking stock of who has participated so far in the staff workshops that are enlivening the Commission room in the dog days of August with an ongoing dialogue about broadband.

So, with apologies to the 12 Days of Christmas, here we go. On the 180th day before the National Broadband Plan, our workshops had given to us:

15 participants from small, disadvantaged and minority businesses

12 from wireless broadband - WISPs, WIMAX, mobile, rural and others

12 governmental officials, from international to local

12 from consumer and public interest groups

11 from academia

10 from equipment manufacturers

Seven from the disabilities community

Seven from big phone companies

Seven from big wireless companies

Six from think tanks

Five from fiber providers

Four from cable providers

Three from journalism, media and publishing

Three from rural phone companies

Two from competitive phone companies

Two from satellite

One each from the analyst world, legal, retail and the web

No partridge in a pear tree. And there won't be one. Unless some engineer can figure out how it can serve as a wi-fi router.

5 Responses to “Workshops By The Numbers”

Huh? Well, yes, you might get to 12 by including folks like Andrew Rasiej, John Wonderlich, Beth White, etc... folks who are non-profits that don't work directly on FCC/Broadband polices in the consumer interest. If you look at it through that lens, you've only got 3 (CFA, New America, CDT). Nevermind that in the initial announcements of the 2nd week of workshops, there were no consumer/public interest panelists, as they were added at the last minute.

Either way, this list is not informative, because on the topics like SDBs, E-government, Education, disabilities, etc... you'd expect to see those constituencies represented. In the more general topic workshops on deployment, technology and adoption, they've been totally lopsided, with "think tanks" paid by industry (ITIF, Emperis, Phoenix, etc...) actually making them even more skewed towards industry.

By my count, 76 of the 110 in your list have direct or indirect ties to industry (69%).

If you only at the FCC policy focused workshops (2, 3, 4, 5, 7) you only had 2 consumer/public interest witnesses who take policy positions, out of 77 total. That's 3 PERCENT!

My definition of broadband is where there is NO monitoring or traffic controlling schemes in place that allows free ACTUALL use of the internet with NO hidden caps that change without the customers knowledge.

Hopefully, there will not only be no partridge in a pear tree but also no TCP/IP via carrier pigeon. Though in rural areas, due to high bandwidth costs, it might seem cost-effective compared to obtaining Internet bandwidth from an ILEC.

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